


Too Many Rooms

by ahimsabitches



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Bill tries the emotional labor thing, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Nancy did not get nearly enough play in this show, Nancy is a hidden gem and I love her, Pregnancy, fertility treatments in the 70s were something else, it works... sorta, or lack thereof, they have sex also btw, this entire time I have resisted the urge to make a pregNancy pun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-29 00:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12619108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: At some point you get tired of bashing your head against the same wall and getting the same result.





	Too Many Rooms

As he took the last drag on his cigarette, Bill leaned over the railing to peek in the bay window. The kitchen light was on, but Nancy wasn’t in there. And why would she be? It was quarter to midnight. He dropped the cig onto the welcome mat, crushed it, then flicked it into the squat little holly bush beside the stoop with the toe of his loafer.

He’d catch it for being so late, but he couldn’t help if his plane was delayed. “I’m home, Nance,” died in his throat. He stood in the doorway, mouth open, listening to motes of soft piano music drift through the nightdim house.

It had been a _long_ time since Nance had touched the baby grand in the living room.  Years. Five? More? He didn’t recognize the tune, but if it wasn’t that one by Beethoven or a Sinatra tune, he wouldn’t have anyway. Nancy was always better at that stuff. Music. Writing. Drawing. Creative stuff.

He shrugged his overcoat off, vague confusion drawing his eyebrows together, and nudged the front door shut with his shoe. Leaving his briefcase and suitcase where he’d dropped them, he strode into the living room, head craned to peek around the wall to where the piano squatted behind the couch. “Nance?”

Under the buttery yellow light of the standing lamp beside the piano, Nancy sat straightbacked and slim in her white nightie on the bench, one bare foot extended to the pedals and one tucked primly under the bench, all of her face but the point of her nose obscured by her mousebrown curls. Her fingers moved over the keys with a sluggishness that reminded Bill of some tentacled thing crawling across the ocean floor. They were the only part of her that moved. A dull lurch of unease rolled through his stomach. He straddled the bench and eased down beside her. “Nancy? You okay?”

Her fingers paused, floating over the keys like dead starfish. One hand reached up to a glass beside the sheet music he hadn’t noticed before, and confusion fissioned to alarm and a quick burst of anger when the heavy, sweet scent of the honeybrown liquid in it hit him. _Not my Glen-fucking-fiddich!_ She knocked back the half-finger of scotch in one gulp. Grimaced. “Not at all,” she slurred.

“ _Jesus_ , Nance.” He extinguished the anger, scooted closer and cupped her jaw in his hands, his fingers disappearing into her hair. “What happened?”

Brown bags sagged under her eyes, which would not rise higher than his third shirt button. Her face held all the liveliness and color of a park statue despite the amount of his best liquor she’d drunk.

“I thought we had it this time,” she murmured. “I really did. I didn’t bleed last month—I didn’t tell you ‘cause…”

A lump lodged in Bill’s throat. It burned there.

Nancy shook her head, as if arguing with herself. Her curls wagged against her head in one mass. “I was late this month too, so…I took a pee test. The day after you left. It was p-positive. I didn’t call you ‘cause, well… “ she paused. Her delicate throat bobbed. “I went to the doctor. Today. To get a real test. To make sure before I called you.”

Bill hated the watery slur in her voice. It told him all he needed to know, but he kept his mouth shut and let Nancy speak.

“He said that sometimes you get false positives. Sometimes they mess up the chemicals in the tests. Sometimes the egg is fertilized, but it just…” she took a deep, shuddering breath. “Disappears.”

A volcanic fist squeezed Bill’s heart. He pulled her forward and rested his lips on the crown of her head. Her hair tickled his nose.

“I wanted to have good news to tell you when you got home. I’m sorry, Bill. I’m _so_ sorry.” Her voice cracked.

“I’m sorry too,” Bill rumbled into her scalp.

They remained that way for a time. He gently separated them, angling her chin up to him. She did not meet his eyes immediately. When she did, they socked Bill in the chest. Bright, hectic grief shone in her big doebrown eyes like tears behind a bloodshot alcohol glaze. Bill brushed his thumb along the bruise-colored crescent below her right eye, but the soft skin there was dry. Nancy didn’t cry easy.

She didn’t spook easy either, which was good for the job he’d landed—though he’d never subject her to that shit as long as he had a choice--- and why he didn’t feel _too_ bad about doing this Road School thing and leaving her knocking around the house all by herself for a couple weeks at a time. He’d run the idea of Road School by her expecting a rejection, but she’d hiked one eyebrow and the same corner of her mouth in that eminently sassy expression that never failed to rev his engines, and had answered him by way of asking if he was aware of how many daycares and animal shelters needed workers, and how many rich politicians’ kids needed tutoring around here. Bill had shaken his head and chuckled. She’d always had more energy in her little finger than Bill had had in his whole body. Dancy Nancy. She hated the nickname, mostly because her brother had given it to her. But it suited.

Except for now, maybe.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she spoke first.

“No more doctors, Bill.” She placed a cool, paper-dry hand on his wrist. “I’m done. I’m sick of them. I’m sick of hearing their fakey sympathy and taking the fakey scripts they’re paid to push on desperate women like me and watching them start thinking of their first cocktail or their pretty secretary or whatever stupid perfect luxury they get to go home to while I’m still in front of them knowing all I have to go home to is a house with too many rooms for too few people and another week of flushing my blood down the toilet like…” her voice hitched. “…like one of your _criminals,”_ she spat, her nose wrinkling.

Another brief, senseless stripe of anger lit up the inside of his skull. He gritted his teeth and doused it. “Okay,” Bill said. “No more doctors. We can be done with this.”

She fetched a full, bone-weary sigh, and Bill could not ignore the note of relief in it. Her head rolled heavily against his left hand. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for, Nance.” On the heels of those words, the old horrible thought: _what if it’s me? What if I’m the one that needs to be sorry?_

He shut his eyes this time, but this intruder wasn’t so easily thrown out. Nevertheless he did, and, still holding her face in his hands, he leaned in and kissed her. She tasted like scotch and it hurt his heart. Her mouth moved weakly against his. When they broke, a rim of tears sat upon her eyelashes.

“We’ve made everything else work, Bill. Why not this?”

He opened his mouth. _What if it’s me?_ Closed it. “I don’t know.”

“I _hate_ this,” she husked. A tear overspilled and tracked a tiny globe of yellow lamplight down her cheek.

“Me too, babe,” he said, and drew her into his arms. She looped her arms around his ribs and buried her face in his shoulder. Bill sucked in a deep, comforting breath of her coconut shampoo and the heartbreakingly sweet Nancy-smell that made his heart swell painfully as she settled against him.

At first, the thought of kids had almost terrifying enough to make Bill keep the little clamshell jewelry box palmed, but he’d dropped to one knee at the end of her parents’ driveway after her senior prom and opened it to her anyway. The silver-and-zircon ring nestled like a pearl on a nightblue velvet tongue wasn’t much— no handmedown grandmother’s engagement ring for Billy Tench’s girl--but Nancy had reacted as if he’d offered her the Crown Jewels.

Bill smiled into her curls. _How rare in this world,_ he thought, _it is to find someone who is as crazy about you—and_ for _you—as you are for them. How rare it is._

He squeezed her, and she squeezed back. 

She had prodded Bill gently but doggedly as their twenties rolled toward their thirties, and they both had found, as all young couples find, that upon the map of one’s mind there is a coastline which no wave of persuasion or wheedling or begging or bartering can wear down.

But in the end, after he’d gotten back from Fort Bragg, Bill had realized that on this too, their topographies matched. So he had watched her joyfully upend her bottle of Enovid over the toilet. Then he had taken her in his arms, both of them giggling like newlyweds, and had carried her to their bed. He had kissed her, whispered delicious things to her, mounted her. The orgasms arrived like fireworks during that week, but there was no baby.

Not that month, nor the next or the next.

Two years’ worth of months capered by, and then two strained, harried years of doctors’ visits slogged by. This ordeal would have fractured other couples, but the dart between their hearts was sure as a diamond chain. Nancy had diamonds in her spine too; she never let the heaped disappointments break her. But she bent under their weight, under test results folded around ads for fertility treatments, under trashcans full of pee stick wrappers, under the pregnancy that lasted almost two months before it had inexplicably vanished into her body like a ghost not meant for the halls it haunted.

A great humpbacked guilt began to swim below Bill’s mind, moaning one grating question: _What if it’s me?_

He knew he should just haul his ass to the sawbones. Get a test. He’d have to go into a sterilized bathroom with a badly used copy of some drugstore tit rag and shoot his load into a cup, but that would be a small price to pay for peace for Nancy. “Got some rough news for ya, Mister Tench,” the doctor would say, a wry, apologetic twist to his mouth which had pursed around too many cigarettes, “your little guys aren’t as lively as they ought to be for a man your age. In the business we call that low sperm count. That doesn’t mean kids are impossible, but it does make it harder.” But both of them would know that _harder_ came closer and closer to _impossible_ the more the years went by. Then the doc would give his speech, hawk whatever the equivalent of fertility treatments for men were, if any, and then Bill would take the paper home to Nancy

“Went to the doc,” he would say this time. “It’s me, Nance. I’m the problem. It’s not you.”

He knew he should just go to the doctor, but… somehow he could never find the time. The Bureau kept fighting him over his project for a new department, and Shepard had made it clear that his influence with the top brass could only go so far. Fifty-hour weeks became eighty-hour ones, because even Shepard thought having a teaching department for behavioral science was a good idea, and by Sunday afternoon he needed the golf course as bad as he needed a cigarette after a shitty meeting with the shitheeled directors.

But he _would_ get to the doctor soon, he insisted to himself. Then Nancy could shake off the terrible babyfaced devil riding on her shoulders and then things would go back to normal.

_But will they, Bill?_ The voice droned. _Nancy’s wanted a family since you were kids yourselves. And isn’t that why you bought this house? For the school districts, right? Nance_ really _wants some rugrats, Bill-old-son, and if you tell her you can’t give them to her then maybe she’ll decide to go find someone who can._

In near-panic, he’d launched the thought as far away from him as he could. But, damnably loyal _dog_ it was, the guilt came trotting back with it between its rotted, slavering jaws over and over again.

Bill never made it to the doctor.

Sex became a battle—not Bill against Nancy, _never_ that, but Nancy against her own body. She came to bed like a bedraggled soldier, and once had even pulled Bill’s head up from between her legs, his tongue still halfway out of his mouth. “Just put it in me and get it over with,” she’d said, and then had burst into sobs that wracked her entire frame.

The two-month-long dry spell following that low, heavy night was actually a relief for both of them. In the prosaically magical way only good couples could do, they discussed the specter of their child in a space below words, at the waterline of conscious awareness, and agreed to let it float away from them. They relearned the simple skin-to-skin joy of being close to each other, the gospel harmony of _good morning, honey_ and the burbling coffeepot. Bill forgot the ugly drooling guilt— _what if it’s me_ —and Nancy remembered that the only time love and war were the same thing was in poetry. The next time Bill dove between her legs, she gripped the back of his head in clawed hands and nearly suffocated him against her bucking cunt.  

The hope they both carried like baby birds against their chests—that somehow this emotional reset had a biological component— also remained unspoken.

Good that it had, because now, a season and a half after that new and lovely night, it died as they both sat hugging each other on a rickety old piano bench. Died, it seemed, for good.

_God I need a cigarette_. The thought whisked by and was gone.

If Bill were punishingly honest with himself, he found no small amount of relief in the thought of being able to make love to Nancy without feeling like a nervous third grader called on to stand at the front of the class and read his book report. Not that he had stopped _wanting_ to make love to her, or fuck her; entirely the opposite. But half the point of the act was to be pleasurable. When stripped of that, it was no longer making love and instead it held all of the appeal of a Road School class for a bunch of lowcountry hicktown cops with more suspicion of outsiders than teeth between them all.

“Let’s go to bed,” Nancy murmured into Bill’s shirt. “I’m exhausted.”

He kissed her head. “Drink a couple glasses of water first, or you’ll wake up with the world’s worst hangover. Glenfiddich doesn’t screw around.”

“I know.”

Bill cocked an eyebrow, but now was not the time to ask her about the familiarity of her relationship with his scotch.

After downing a glass of water, Nancy followed him into the bathroom, where she brushed the scotch out of her mouth and he scrubbed the electric stink of travel off him. He remembered his luggage still sitting in a heap by the front door, but all he wanted to do was lie down and feel his wife breathing next to him.

In nothing but a pair of boxers, he flopped backwards onto the bed and groaned, too beat to even reach for a cigarette. The red nothingness behind his closed eyelids went black. Then Nancy’s comforting weight slipped into bed beside him. He rolled and reached for her, and she curled into his arms. He brought her face to his by curling his right arm, upon which rested her head, and with the middle two fingers of his left hand he traced the gently undulating path of her spine from her neck, over the slippery satin of her nightie, to the place where it disappeared right above her small, round bottom.

“Love you, Nancy,” he rumbled and kissed the corner of her mouth, already tipping over the cliff to unconsciousness.

Nancy’s leg slid up over his hips and hooked behind them. She pressed the entire length of her body to his in a slow, snakelike roll that yanked him back from sleep. The hand that stole over his stubbled jaw was warm now, and her tongue in his mouth tasted like toothpaste and scotch.

“Nance, mmm,” he said around her kiss, which grew insistent, “you’re drunk, hon.”

Nevertheless, his body responded. Like a furtive ferret her other hand scooted beneath the waistband of his boxers and found his half-hard dick. He grunted.

“I don’t care. Doesn’t matter. I missed you. I need this. I need you. Not anything else. Not any _one_ else. Just you.” She punctuated each breathless statement with kisses on his lips, chin, neck, chest.

Another fist gripped his heart, but this time the pain of it was sweet and familiar. He grabbed a handful of her nightie at her waist and pulled it up; she fish-wiggled against him to get out of it, and her little tease made him smile. He tossed her nightie off the bed and pulled off his boxers. Nancy tried to help, but her uncoordinated hands ended up getting in the way. He chuckled, the sound deep and rocky in his chest. “Hold your horses, Rambo.”

“Hurry _up_ ,” she breathed, and the need in her voice lit a smoldering coal deep and low in his belly. He kicked his boxers off his ankles and rolled her onto her back. He plunged his face into the cloud of her hair by her neck and kissed the delicate skin there. She moaned as he kissed down to her collarbone and the tiny lovely hollow where it me the cords of her neck, and arched her back up to meet his lips as they closed around one hard, erect nipple.

Her breaths came in rabbit-quick pants. The curving lattice of her ribs under has hands was a little more prominent than Bill liked it to be, but he couldn’t blame her when he made at least three meals a week out of coffee, cigarettes, and half a roll of Tums.

Nevermind. Nevermind. What mattered was here beneath him, wordlessly begging him for everything he already wanted to give her. Her hands clenched and unclenched against his scalp, grabbing at hair that hadn’t been long enough to grab in twenty years. His lips traveled a meandering southward course over the ridges and dips of her until they reached the little furred hill between her legs. Her rich spicy-sweet scent zapped a deep place in his brain and made his cock twitch. He ignored the insistent knocking of his own desire for now and nosed into her warm wet pussy— _god_ she was soaked—and began his work. Nancy cried out and jerked. Bill hooked his hands around her thighs and opened them more. Nancy’s feet landed on his shoulderblades and squirmed there, and he loved it. Loved that he could still make her twitch and pant and scream and come, loved that time was not a thief to them but a gifter, and even though one of its gifts to them was streaks of grey at Bill’s temples, its far richer gifts were diamonds to bind them against the agonies of the world trying to pull them apart.

Nancy’s juices, salty and rich and earthy, dripped off his chin and he loved that too. He rooted her like a pig nosing the ground for truffles, and when her thighs tightened around his ears he knew she was close.

She patted his cheek with a fluttery hand. “Oh Bill, stop…”

He raised his head. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she panted. “I don’t want to come yet. I want to come when you do.”

Warmth spread through him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She put her hands on his jaw and tugged his face forward. “C’mere. Come to me.”

He could do nothing but obey her. She purred as he kissed her, his mouth still silky-wet from her pussy, and yelped hoarsely as he slid into her. Bill coughed a groan at how _slick_ she was and almost lost his strength. “Oh this won’t take long,” he said, and she giggled.

“It _has_ been a while,” she said, and kissed him.

“Yeah it has,” he said, and began a slow rhythm of thrusts. He had been right; it didn’t take the glowing ember in him long to ignite and burn through his stamina. He had to pause more than once and think of his worst chip, the one that had sent the ball clear over the hole and into the woods. Nancy’s dreamily closed eyes and slack-open mouth, limned in faint bluewhite light from the window, didn’t help matters at all. Nor did her needful little moans and the insistent liquid roll of her hips.

“Nance, cool it,” he panted, his voice frayed with the effort of containing his orgasm.

“Nnnnn,” she keened in a wordless negation of his plea, and tightened both legs around his middle to pull him into her.

That did it. “Oh _Christ,_ Nancy,” he growled, and slammed into her full force as the little sun in his belly supernovaed, torching his guts and lighting up the bottom of his brain like the fourth of July. Nancy’s body went rigid and she squealed like a wild thing impaled under him, raking her fingernails down his back. He snarled into her shoulder as the orgasm pulsed through him and pulsed him into her, in slowly diminishing waves.

Bill’s galloping heart slowed to a canter, then a trot. Nancy’s back slowly lost its fierce arch. He peppered her sweet flesh with brief, breathless kisses. She caught his face in both hands and kissed him. He pulled out of her with a small sigh, and neither of them worried about whether his come stayed in her or leaked out of her.

They lay together, forehead to forehead, talking beneath words, their breaths mixing and their legs twined.

The idea slid so effortlessly into Bill that it seemed to bypass his brain altogether and spill out of his mouth already fully formed: “What if we adopted a kid?”

Nancy’s fingers stopped their starfishy journey along his ribs. She reared up on one elbow and looked at him, her eyes big and bright in the dark.


End file.
